ABSTRACT
Many freshman students I teach in Japanese universities have little experience writing in English. By ‘writing’, I don’t mean language-pattern practice, or ‘sentencing’ drills—something they have devoted countless hours to in their secondary school English classes. I mean extended composition beyond the sentence—writing to perform some social activity such as persuading others, conveying information, or expressing feelings. Despite ministry directives for more communicative pedagogy in secondary school, the reality is that for many students, writing in English still means performing highly controlled sentence-level exercises (e.g., translation, phrase substitution, and cloze drills).
